- Accidental Aesop: Some find the deliberate Broken Aesop at the ending, with the Animorphs happily eating hamburgers right after seeing the cruelty of slaughterhouses, to display a complex message about the difficulty of systemic change. The Animorphs have seen how brutal factory farming is, but it's too difficult to cut meat out of their diets, and they have bigger priorities. As a result, they leave this problem unaddressed.
- Broken Aesop:
- The Animorphs learn how gruesome slaughterhouses are... and in the final chapter, they go out for burgers. The final chapter was written by K.A. Applegate herself, who hated that the ghostwriter had had Ax scared in the slaughterhouse and uneasy about how humans treat animals.
- Cassie preaching about how free will is impossible to eradicate falls flat for two reasons. First, More than Mind Control exists in real life. Second, even her argument that Yeerk hosts can still think their own thoughts and feel their own emotions doesn't work, as Temrash 114 proved that Yeerks can mentally torture their hosts until they emotionally break them and the host stops fighting back or goes catatonic, and the torture happens because the host was thinking thoughts that the Yeerk disapproved of. (However, plenty of hosts such as John Berryman, Eva, Chapman, and Alloran do resist despite that, and in fact most prove they're not actually broken immediately as soon as their Yeerks are gone, even if they've been infested for many years).
- Harsher in Hindsight: Since the publication of the book, the ethical stances Cassie takes here - that animal testing done for the sake of important things like medical research is okay, but testing makeup in ways that cause the test animals to go blind isn't, that all animals used for testing should be treated better, that chimpanzees shouldn't be killed - have become quite mainstream and normal. This makes Marco's oppositional stance seem much crueler than it did in the 90s.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/YMMV/AnimorphsTheExperiment
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